The Environmental Cost Of War

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The rain that's coming down seems to be saturated or filled with oil.

You can see it's completely black.

Everything on the ground is black as well.

And if you look over here at this wall, you can see that the rain water coming down here is also black.

That's reporting from CNN's Frederick Pleitgen earlier this month in Tehran.

It occurred the morning after major air strikes by Israel on Iran's oil facilities.

The city of nearly 10 million people was engulfed in thick black smoke.

The World Health Organization warned that, quote,

the conflict in the Middle East poses serious threats to public health.

A new report from the Think Tank Climate and Community Institute finds that the war unleashed over five million tons of carbon in just two weeks,

which for context is more climate pollution than Iceland generates in a year.

The environmental cost is growing as the death toll rises too.

The US and Israel's war on Iran is killed at least 1,500 people in the country,

that's according to Iran's health ministry.

And experts warned the environmental cost of the war can compound harm on human health for generations to come.

Add to that the energy crisis the war is brewing, which could lead to even more long-term effects on the environment and public health.

I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A podcast.

After a quick break, war, the environment and our health.

Stay with us.

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Let's jump into the conversation with Doug Weir, the director of the conflict and environment observatory.

That's a UK-based nonprofit which works to raise awareness about the environmental and humanitarian consequences of war.

Doug, welcome to the program.

Hi, thanks for having me.

And Professor John Levy, he's the chair of the Environmental Health Department at Boston University School of Public Health.

John, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So let's start with Israel's strikes on fuel depots in Iran.

Residents in around Tehran experience black rain after intense air strikes on oil facilities.

One resident told time, quote,

the skin on my face, especially my lips, is sore and raw.

It burns and feels like diluted tear gas is in the air.

It irritates my eyes and I keep needing to clear my throat.

Doug, first just give us an overview of these attacks.

Yeah, sure.

So I think the first thing to understand is that oil facilities like these are very common targets in conflict areas.

They have perceived military value to destroy them.

I think in this case, these facilities were primarily civilian use.

They are civilian objects and should be protected.

Also critically, I think is the setting of Tehran.

So you have a city of 9 million people, which is partially enclosed by mountains.

It is well known that it has air quality problems because it traps pollutants in the city.

And so attacking these four facilities overnight as Israel did,

led to a huge fires and a lot of its pollution was pushed down into the city.

And huge smoke plumes from these fires contained all sorts of nasties from carbon monoxide,

sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds,

and particles of sorts and organic material and trace metals as well.

So that's what people were exposed to directly through inhalation.

And that's what we saw coming down in rain as a rain shower pass through the city.

And when you talk about pollution being trapped in the city,

is that a result of Iran's topography or something else?

Yes, it's due to Tehran's topography.

So it's partially enclosed by mountains and overnight.

We see the atmosphere pushing pollutants down into the city.

It's a very packed city as well.

So it doesn't necessarily get the airflow that clear pollutants easily.

All of this is well known.

It's no great state secret or nothing.

So it was quite clear that if you attack these facilities overnight,

you will end up with what is essentially an industrial disaster in the city.

Now, Doug laid out some of the pollutants that are released as a result of these strikes, John.

What are some of the short-term health risks this poses to Iranians on the ground?

So in the short-term, especially for pollutants like particulate matter,

which Doug mentioned, sort of the smoke that you see in the air,

that can cause a lot of respiratory problems or difficulty breathing.

Certainly if you have asthma, could lead to asthma attacks.

A lot of people report headaches, which is very common for those high levels of pollution.

And there's also increases in cardiovascular risk when you're exposed to high levels of particular air pollution.

So you might see more heart attacks and other cardiovascular events.

So there's a pretty wide array of short-term impacts.

And when you're seeing these visible complaints of symptoms,

that's a pretty good sign that people are being quite highly exposed.

And what about the longer-term health effects?

The longer-term is trickier, but I think equally important.

We know that pollutants like particulate matter can lead to long-term mortality risks,

respiratory and cardiovascular.

There is also risk of cancer.

And some of the pollutants that Doug mentioned, as well as others, things like PAHs,

as well as spalt organic compounds are known to cause cancer.

And so that, of course, wouldn't manifest in the short-term,

but very high exposures, especially sustained over a considerable period of time,

could increase risks of things like cancer as well as cardiovascular or respiratory disease.

Doug, when we talk about the black rain and the smoke in Tehran,

we're describing primarily respiratory responses.

But what are some of the knock-on effects when we think about perhaps water sources being affected or food?

Yeah, I think from our monitoring, we saw that clearly oil products had entered the storm-drain system.

There was very shocking footage of explosion in the underground storm system blowing up the street level.

When we look at the digital elevation map for the sites,

we can see that there would be a tendency for the pollutants to move down slope

and potentially getting into soils and also into water aquifers.

And one of the things we were around at the moment is that it could probably be intense drought

for a long period of time, coupled with very poor water governance.

And so water resources like aquifers are particularly sensitive in Iran and are already under pressure.

So it's something which we need to be particularly careful about avoiding additional damage to,

like pollution from these oil products.

And are we talking about pollution that is then limited to Iran

or Tehran, or is there the possibility of these pollutants reaching other areas as well?

Yeah, I think our primary focus is around the local area where these pollutants fall out.

I mean, with some of these large oil fires, we see pollutants fall out if the plume comes near to the ground.

It's often, it's lofted quite high up above.

In some cases, historically, 11, 1991 Gulf War oil fires,

these were like 700 oil wells which burned for months on end.

And it was shown that they had deposited soot in MLAs

and increased the rate of place you're melting by turning the white snow darker.

But in this case, we're looking at kind of isolated incidents from these oil facilities.

John, who might be especially vulnerable to the type of pollution we're describing?

So there's a bunch of groups that we would worry most about.

Young children are at greater risk.

They tend to breathe in a lot for the amount of size that they have.

They can be at risk for developing asthma, other respiratory disease.

We worry about older individuals who may have cardiovascular disease or respiratory disease

and are at heightened risk for exposures to things like air pollution.

We worry about pregnant women because there are risks of adverse birth outcomes

with exposure to some of these toxicants.

And so everyone has some potential risk from being exposed.

But those are some of the groups that are at greatest concern,

as well as anyone who has a pre-existing health condition

that could be exacerbated by air pollution, again, respiratory, cardiovascular, or even diabetes.

What options do residents have to try to protect themselves?

It's very challenging, for sure, in typical situations, for example,

when we have wildfires here in the United States,

but the guidance is often to stay indoors.

If you have an air filtration system to use that,

to wear masks, certainly an outdoor settings, as well as indoor settings,

because this pollution can infiltrate into the indoor environment.

That guidance is a lot more difficult, clearly, in the midst of wartime.

I do think each of those steps can help,

and so people can take, at least, measures to reduce their exposures.

It's typically, at least, better to be indoors and outdoors,

if you don't have access to a robust N95 mask,

even putting a bandana around your mouth may not protect from the smallest particles,

but can help from some of the larger particles that are falling out.

It's sort of taking each possible step you can do to reduce your exposure,

acknowledging that it's going to be pretty tough for most people to really

bring down their exposures in the midst of wartime.

With that context, what concerns do you have about Iran's public health infrastructure,

and the way residents are able to access care if they are affected by this pollution?

It's an important question, because when we're talking about the short-term health effects,

again, I mentioned things like asthma attacks, heart attacks,

you need to be able to get to hospitals and emergency rooms and visit doctors,

and if you're not able to access health care in a timely manner,

the impact of that can be heightened,

so an asthma attack that may have been able to be contained if you can get to the ER,

could lead to much greater problems if you can't access those resources.

If we're looking at the effects of the elevated air pollution in a vacuum,

it's bad enough, but in the context of degraded public health infrastructure,

health infrastructure, and war time, it's that much worse.

That's Professor Jonathan Levy. He's the chair of the Environmental Health Department

at Boston University School of Public Health.

John, thank you for speaking with us.

Sure, thank you.

Doug, we're the director of the conflict and environment observatory is staying with us,

and we're hearing from you, one member of our tech club rights,

my uncle served in Vietnam and received an orange heart for his exposure to Asian orange.

They told him for those exposed, it's not a question of if they would have health problems,

but when? He passed last year, and I think about him with the current events of the world.

Coming up, how the war in Iran could lead to a water and energy crisis that's just ahead.

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Back now to the environmental cost of war.

And let's bring in two more voices.

Anita Crawford is a professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

She's also the co-founder and strategic advisor at the Costs of War project at Brown University.

Professor Crawford, thanks for joining us.

I bet it be with you.

And Patrick Bigger, he's a research director at the Climate and Community Institute.

That's a progressive climate and economy thing, Tang. Patrick, it's great to have you.

Great to be here.

I'm also hearing from you, one of our text club member rights.

After Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, my father died of an aggressive cancer.

It was our own military, our own government that allowed this exposure to our men and women.

Now, hardly anyone thinks about Vietnam anymore.

And the peaceful men and women who were sent over there to die.

But I do. I still miss my father. It never stops.

Patrick, I want to jump in with a report from your organization which you co-authored.

It found over five million tons of greenhouse gas emissions were emitted from just two weeks of conflict in Iran.

That's on par with the annual emissions of Iceland.

Help us understand the impact of those emissions and what it actually means for the environment and human health.

Well, I think it's important to flag that five million tons of emissions is not a huge volume in the grand scheme of things.

But as we reflect on our dwindling carbon budget that we have left to stay under 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming as we've been warned that we need to to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Any additional and effectively voluntary addition to global emissions is really not helpful.

And so thinking about the climate cost of war is a way of illustrating why we need different kinds of foreign policy, different kinds of international relations.

If we're really going to make a concerted global effort to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

A professor Crawford, the black rain scene in Tehran came from attacks on the oil facilities in Iran.

What short and longer term environmental effects could we see from these attacks on that energy infrastructure?

Well, in a short run, the most concerning element and it wasn't actually mentioned in the report you just spoke about is the methane released from both the oil infrastructure, the uncontrolled release of methane and the methane released when cities are attacked.

So methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. It's 25 times more potent in terms of warming capacity than carbon dioxide.

And that release as Doug we're noted may end at the end of the war or may go on for months as facilities burn or you can't control the leaks from the pipes that are destroyed.

So that's a major concern. And then in addition, some of that black smoke will be lofted very high into the atmosphere and will circulate around the world.

That may cause a tiny infinitesimal amount of cooling but for the most part the destruction of the oil fields and the natural gas facilities is a tremendous and in fact uncounted because we can't count these leaks part of the story.

We've talked a lot about the black rain that came from the attacks on the oil facilities in Iran, but Doug your organization is recorded over 400 incidents of environmental harm since the start of the US and Israel's war on Iran. What other kinds of incidents are we seeing?

Sure. So with our monitoring methodology, it's kind of facility-based. So we look at particular environmental infrastructures which have risks of the environment when they're damaged. So that might be power plants, it might be industrial zones, it might be military bases or air fields, for example.

And in the first few weeks of the war, we saw a fairly familiar pattern of lots of military sites being targeted. So some of the ones that concern are large ammunition storage areas. So when these are struck, you tend to have a lot of kick out of pollution from military materials. So this might be explosives or propellants and many of these are toxic and summer environmentally persistent.

We've also seen lots of attacks on missile facilities and many of the fuels used in these ballistic missiles are very unpleasant and hazardous for the environment.

In addition, we've seen more attacks on oil-related facilities and indeed on shipping and ports as well. So also risks to the marine environment.

One of the things we've kind of been watching is as a war has gone on, you see this kind of list of targets gone through the environmental harms associated with those. I think increasingly we're seeing quite a lot of bombing within urban areas as well so that that brings in the spectrum of this health risks from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, which can expose people to very poor air quality and an exposure to things like asbestos when buildings are damaged.

What are the challenges around monitoring the environmental harms that come from conflict Doug?

Yeah, I mean it can be hugely challenging. We do what we do because the traditional model has been that you go in after a conflict when people stop shooting and when it's safe for the UN and other stakeholders to do environmental assessments.

That obviously means that you miss a lot of the environmental story during the conflict. Over the last 15 years we've had much better access to satellite imagery.

We also use social media extensively to try and identify what's going on and we have a methodology which we developed for the war in Ukraine, which takes you through various steps to determine the environmental risk from particular types of damage to facilities.

So for example, we have about 130 different facility types in the database with potential environmental risk from them. We can look at what they're in proximity to.

Is it agricultural land? Is it water body? Is it some is an ecologically important area? And this helps us develop a kind of risk storm prioritization around these sites.

Obviously this is a very limited picture and really for all of these environmental problems, you've got to get on the ground, take source samples, take water samples, but that may be way down the line before that happens.

Patrick, I'm curious about the challenges you face and really understanding and explaining to the public how much pollution is being emitted, the potential longer term effects of that pollution on the environment in human health.

So like Doug, we have to rely on more or less open source reporting. We try to tally the number of bombs that are being dropped, the volume of oil that's burned and then apply our own methodology, which we also developed trying to track the emissions from the Israeli assault on Gaza, starting after the attacks of October 7th.

And so it's always a challenge to know if you are, you know, counting everything that could be counted. And so we think that our estimates are always very conservative.

As Professor Crawford said, you know, we're not even covering the potential methane emissions from these attacks on Iran so far.

But this is part of a broader challenge that we have in understanding the full scope of the climate harms done by militaries across the world, because from the very outset of designing sort of global climate governance at the, you know, the Kyoto protocols in the 1990s.

Militaries, and especially the US military saw an explicit carve out from reporting their emissions. And so for a long, long time, it was up to researchers like us, like Professor Crawford, others to even understand what the climate impacts of militaries were in general, much less their conflict emissions, which we now have okay methodologies for each of these things, I think.

But it still falls on independent researchers to try to understand them and then communicate our findings to the public about, you know, the fact that militaries represent five and a half percent of global emissions, which is more than global commercial aviation, right?

These are really substantial emissions that are fundamentally not being counted and are, you know, not really subject to the kinds of emissions reduction policies that virtually every other sector in the world is.

Well, Professor Crawford, you've calculated that the Pentagon is the world's largest single greenhouse gas emitter. How does one country's military become so environmentally detrimental?

Well, the United States military is unlike any other military in the world. The US has 700 right now overseas bases. It's got thousands of bases and installations in the continental United States and Hawaii.

So it's just standing infrastructure, pre-war, during war, after war is enormously emitting. And for instance, last year, rather 2024, the United States military in its installations and operations emitted 47 million metric tons, and that's larger than the emissions of Norway or Sweden in any one year.

So it's so large because the United States footprint, global footprint is large. And then when it makes war, it has a preference to make war with aircraft.

It doesn't like to put a lot of boots on the ground and aircraft in particular account for most of the operational emissions, right?

So a plane which burns four gallons per mile is not efficient. That's the kind of air force that we have. And each branch of the military has its own planes.

We're hearing from many of you. One of you emails, my husband was a C-141 pilot and flew in the first Gulf War. He developed and died of ALS and the VA now considers ALS a 100% service connection.

Environmental factors such as toxins and heavy metals have been linked to ALS. We also heard from Robert who says I served in the Persian Gulf War with the third armored Calvary Regiment.

I was exposed to a large number of toxins, everything from tanks shut up with depleted uranium shells to burn pits. I'm now in the Veterans Administration Health Registry, which quote,

will monitor my health and as a consequence any health issues are presumed to be service-related.

We also got this text from one listener who says, let's pray that this war causes the markets to trend towards sustainable energy so our children will be able to breathe.

Now this war is creating an energy crisis in the US and globally. Professor Crawford, what could that mean for us and the types of energy we rely on in the longer term?

Well, in the short run, it means that when people can't heat their homes in a war zone, they turn to coal and coffee cans and other highly emitting forms of energy production.

And if countries across the globe, mostly in Asia, which is where most of us oil from the Persian Gulf is going, cannot use petroleum or natural gas, they will burn more coal in the short run.

And that reliance and the maintenance of coal infrastructure delays the transition to alternative fuels. And so you add the delay that isn't a feature of this and the increased short term use of fossil fuels to the actual use of fuel in the war zones.

And the destruction there that's quite a bump. And then in addition, what happens is during wartime and afterwards, for instance, we saw this with the war in Ukraine, countries that are near the fighting will often increase their military spending.

And that itself causes a bump in buying more aircraft, tanks, missiles, increasing military industrial production, which is itself highly greenhouse gas emitting.

And then the operations and training of those military skill up and this has been documented many times in scientific journals that increases in military spending are correlated with national increases in emissions.

And this is a very long term consequence. So any sort of good luck we have with in the short run, people transitioning to alternative energy is great.

But wars itself are far outweigh in some respects those gains.

Patrick, I see you nodding as Professor Crawford is speaking. Is there anything you'd add?

Absolutely. I think that's a really good summary of some of the military dimensions. And I think thinking maybe even one step further removed understanding the sort of global political economy of energy.

What we've seen over and over again during energy shocks are windfall profits to fossil fuel firms, especially those whose whose production is unaffected directly by the conflict.

So thinking of US fossil fuel producers here primarily right now, who are going to experience this huge windfall profit.

And then we'll almost invariably as they have for the last 50 years plow some of those back into expanded exploration and production of new fossil fuels, which creates these lock in effects right it's virtually unprecedented for us to not use up an energy source that we have found.

And so therefore by as we see the price of oil skyrocketing and the cost of energy really becoming very volatile, which profit traders can profit off of.

We'll see that plot back into new fossil fuel infrastructure, particularly in countries that are not do not seem to be particularly concerned with the impacts of the climate crisis like the United States right now.

But conversely we know that this will also hopefully push some countries to really double down on their investment in renewables.

For example, we see Pakistan weathering this energy shock much better than they did the energy shock after the invasion of Ukraine because they invested so much in solar.

So these things can really break either way.

One of you shares this my grandfather who served as a naval captain on submarines from just after World War II for several decades at lasting lung damage that the government ended up giving him disability compensation for.

I've always wondered if his children's lungs issues were a result of growing up on naval bases during his service.

We'll hear more from you and our guests in just a moment.

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Well we're grateful so many of you have shared your stories with us Ronald emails I served in the US Army as an infantry man and army special forces soldier during the first Persian Gulf War.

We were exposed to a chemical attack and we utilized burn pets we were also exposed to the fallout black rain from the oil well fires and lived in that environment for several weeks before it was deemed dangerous.

I was diagnosed with an aggressive bone marrow cancer I was told by doctors this is not curable but if I agree to a bone marrow transplant I could survive for several more years beyond the predicted expiration time frame.

I volunteered to serve and understood the risk I could possibly face but not this.

We also heard from H who emails many members of my family in Iraq suffered from cancers and heart disease after the US War and invasion some have died at a young age even though my family had been known for its longevity.

Thank you for covering this often neglected aspect of wars.

Doug the US and Israeli War on Iran is in its fourth week so we can only speak so much about what may occur but what can we learn from past conflicts about long term environmental and health effects for both civilians and service members.

Yeah I think some of those stories from people writing in really illustrative of the experience of many particularly service personnel and also civilians living in these areas.

I think when we look at this region in particular there are some very significant amounts of history related to environmental damage and also shifts in environmental policy around conflict in the environment.

So the 1991 Gulf War when Iraq was withdrawing from Q8 the military set fire to 700 oil wells some of which burnt for 11 months and it was this huge pollution incident.

In addition pipelines were opened and you had one of the largest oil spills in history in the Persian Gulf.

Interestingly you know up until a couple of years ago Saudi Arabia was still cleaning up beaches which were oiled during that period.

Going back even further you have the Iran Iraq war in the late eighties where you had huge number of tax on tankers and on oil terminals.

So we've seen this kind of constant stream and all the circular periods of environmental damage which triggers what some call kind of slow violence and it's damaged into degrading to ecosystems and to natural resources and it also impacts the civilian population very significantly.

And I think in many of these complex zones what coverage there has been has tended to be on the impacts on military and on veterans which is completely understandable from a kind of US perspective or a UK perspective.

There's much less attention and less health support provided for the civilians living in these areas and often we see that environmental governance is very weak.

The environmental monitoring capacity is very weak populations move around so epidemiological studies are very complicated to undertake.

And so often there's not enough structural support for these communities who've been affected by environmental degradation and not enough research and awareness on the health impacts of that degradation.

Professor Crawford has there been any global commitment to better understanding the environmental impacts of war.

Well the conflict environment observatory which Doug we're works that is is doing remarkably important work and consistently important work.

And let me just be clear I mean from world leaders are world leaders taking this into account.

So the current president of the United States seems uninterested in the short medium and long term effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

But I think historically we've tended to focus on immediate consequences of violence and rightly so the service members who are wounded and killed.

The environment tends to become you know something that's very low on the totem pole.

We also don't see a lot of understanding by world leaders and that is members of Congress or heads of state and looking at the sort of longer term impact of having militaries themselves.

So for instance in Hawaii on Oahu there was a leak at the Red Hill fuel storage depot in 2021 which got into the water table and contaminated drinking water and hurt thousands of people's health.

Then there's fires that are started accidentally during training in Hawaii.

So one of the most beautiful places in the world in peacetime it's constantly harmed by the presence of the military.

They're training the the porting of ships and their use in Hawaii is involved in this current war and their use in wartime.

And then in the war zones themselves a lot of times we lose sight of depleted uranium or unexploded ordinance which then decays over time and makes large areas unusable.

And then what I think we see is a sort of short term focus on well we feel insecure.

So we must have large military forces and forgetting that those large military forces cause what we call in my discipline a security dilemma where what I do to defend myself causes you to feel less secure.

And when all sides are feeling insecure they increase their military spending increase their level of mobilization and tensions.

And what we have to see in the future if you want to get out of this cycle is leaders looking to other tools. So these are habits of mind.

Doug what are some of those potential other tools are there specific strategies you'd like to see countries employed to mitigate some of what we're discussing today.

Yeah so I think as me to indicate that the environment has been kind of this secondary tertiary issue.

It's not been in folks at the story and for all the reasons we've discussed and that's meant that policy has been kind of slow to develop and catch up.

And there are elements since national humanitarian law which should protect the environment during conflict so example the environment is a civilian object unless it becomes otherwise because it's used by the military.

Similarly we've had a 10 year process a couple of years ago by the UN's National Law Commission to develop 27 legal principles that should protect the environment before during an after armed conflict and in situations of occupation.

So while there are rules out there and the question is one of awareness the question is one of compliance and we often see international humanitarian law breached even when it's a question of protection of civilians let alone protection of the environment.

Some of the other issues are that the responses the environmental and recalculate responses to conflicts tend to be very outhawk.

You know if you're a Ukraine you might benefit from a significant amount of downer funding and support from the international community.

If you were Iran it seems very difficult to think if there's going to be a queue of countries lined up to provide technical and financial support to help Iran deal with environmental problems caused by the conflict.

In addition we don't really anticipate that the regime in Iran will be particularly open or supportive of environmental action they've jailed environmental activists in the recent past.

Similarly you know there is nowhere in the UN system where we talk about conflict and environment where it's dedicated so it kind of pops up in different forer from time to time but we don't really have this concerted effort so.

At the moment while we have rules there's not very much compliance while we have response capacity from people at the UN Environment Program this is ad hoc and it's completely dependent on the political context of the conflicts in which donors may be interested in putting money in.

Well it's worth discussing what comes after war and Patrick on Wednesday President Trump proposed a 15 point ceasefire plan to Iran Iran is not yet accepted the plan and has instead offered a counter proposal.

So as we watch what happens with negotiations to end the war I want to talk about your recent report which highlights the amount of environmental harm that can take place in the rebuilding process explain.

So as we've seen from conflicts and wars of aggression and Gaza and then Ukraine oftentimes the largest piece of the sort of emissions pie of a full conflict is actually come from rebuilding we think about all the homes that have been destroyed all the schools that have been destroyed including the.

The strike that the US conducted on a girl school in the first days of the attacks think about the desalination plans thinking about all the infrastructure that gets destroyed in war the vast majority of that is made of concrete and steel in addition to all the other building materials that go into.

There's a lot of stuff all over the world and concrete and steel are both highly emissions intensive products to to manufacture and then to turn into useful buildings and so this is where we see the largest category of emissions is not in the immediate bombing it's not in you know even even in Iran we're projecting that.

The emissions from burning up fuel refineries and oil depots would be surpassed just by rebuilding emissions and so these these attacks and wars themselves have an incredibly long tail and the way that we would say that you deal with that best is by reducing conflict you have to reduce the propensity for big states to get into.

To pick fights with countries around the world and the only way that you're really going to do that is by reducing capacity of militaries to wage wage these wars of choice.

You know based on our estimates the one trillion dollar Pentagon budget will result in emissions of 178 million tons which is about the same as a rich country like Croatia be about the 30th biggest emitter in the world votes was its own country and so looking to the next administration since this one clearly is not interested in either thinking about.

Just war or climate action the next administration a lot of very serious conversation about what the right level of funding for the Pentagon is if we're serious about both peace and about.

Contending with the climate crisis a member of our tax club rights with all the wars going on we are going to have a very long time making things better with climate change and by the way things are going we might get to the point of no return.

We also heard from Jeffrey who's a retired colonel Jeffrey emails the environmental effects extend far past the war as search production of replacement munitions and repairs require more energy as well as contaminants and other water materials enter the environment from the industry and transportation.

Doug is that something you can speak to Patrick was describing some of the environmental impacts of rebuilding but what about the effect of rebuilding the stockpile of weapons as Jeffrey describes.

Yeah I think you know as Patrick's alluded to and Jeffrey suggested we tend to focus on kind of emissions during the war fighting part but militaries are active and existing constantly they are constantly putting out emissions and I think we've seen very serious amounts of kit used in this conflict thus far.

Tons and tons of the shipped over to Israel for example we used directly by the US and it's one of those things but you know sometimes when we turn sit back and look at like a what are the sort of reverberating environmental effects of a war it almost gives you a sense of vertigo when you try and track all these things you know as we kind of discussed earlier some countries are shifting to coal in the short term other countries may introduce stronger policies on sustainable energy transition in response to this oil shock.

We're seeing reductions in fertiliser exports which will drive up prices which will have an impact on agriculture so there are incredibly complex relationships between conflicts and the environment and the really important lesson is that it's not just in the area where the fighting happens.

These impacts can be felt globally whether it's through emissions or whether it's through environmental policy whether it's through global environmental governance like you know every time we have a conflict or a period of geopolitical instability it makes it more difficult to.

We make progress on the environmental changes which we face globally all of these international environmental agreements are agreed by consensus and if you have geopolitical disturbance like we have at the moment it makes it much less likely the states will reach agreement on issues like climate change or the biodiversity crisis so it's really critical that we step back and look at the impacts on the environment and the global environment as a whole.

Professor Crawford your thoughts.

Yes one of the most important elements of emissions here is military industry and United States military industry is it's the well US military is the biggest exporter of arms and the world and what we're seeing here with the use of equipment especially these bespoke missiles like the Tomahawk and so on.

This is the need to replenish if they the United States wants to keep fighting and that's called reset and the administration has already asked for an additional 200 million dollars to do reset to replenish the stocks but that boost the military industry so as I said earlier it's military industry is not efficient.

It's less efficient than other kinds of industry and it's like the militaries themselves there they use specialized materials and could manufacture equipment to high tolerances to do extreme things and these are greenhouse gas intensive industries so the United States states already has 39 of the top 100 arms.

Manufacturers in the world and because it is such a powerhouse it will not only replenish its own equipment it will be the arsenal for the rest of the world.

Well we'll have to leave the conversation there for now it will continue to cover this story in the days and weeks ahead that's need a Crawford she's a professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews she's also the co founder and strategic advisor at the costs of our project at Brown University.

Also with us today Doug we're the director of the conflict and environment observatory that's a UK based on profit which works to raise awareness about the environmental and humanitarian consequences of war and Patrick bigger he's a research director at the climate and community institute that's a progressive climate and economy thing tank Patrick Doug professor Crawford thank you for speaking with us.

And we'll end with this message from Dee Dee in North Carolina who emails please do not forget about the environmental impacts of war on animals all creatures great and small wild tame marine and farm.

Today's producer was Michelle Harvin this program comes to you from WAMU part of American University in Washington distributed by NPR.

I'm Jen White Nailaboodoo is with you tomorrow for the Friday news round up hope you tune in thanks for listening and we'll talk more soon.

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